Four Dollar Memory
by nimmieamee
Summary: Steve and Bucky and the problem of a certain rat, 1934.


1934.

Outside the window, clothes flapped in the breeze. Someone across the way was trying to bring the line in, and had miscalculated the wind, and now the line had gone loose and was dancing manically in the air. A pair of overalls buffeted against an iron fire escape, and upended – very improbably – an ugly plant in a lightweight metal container, so that it crashed down to the awning of the Chinese lunchroom below, and Mr. Quan, who ran the lunchroom, gave a frantic curse. He was one of the organs of the neighborhood. Mrs. Golovin, who lived upstairs and had set out the plant, was another. Mr. Vedano's Philippine-born wife, who had put out the clothesline, was still a third. On a normal day they were all very polite to each other, and no one cursed at all. But when a strange new element – these winds, so uncharacteristic for the season – entered the city's bloodstream, that element infected the neighborhood in strange, small ways, and left Mr. Quan with a damaged awning.

The city was a living thing, and susceptible to the occasional cold.

Like Steve.

But the city moved on each morning and so would he. Feeling like his head was going to split open from how horribly his sinuses hurt, he sat up, and tried to inhale the scent of boiled shrimp and vegetables from the lunchroom, but it was no go. He couldn't smell a thing. He swung out of bed (a folding cot at night, an unseen apparatus of wires tucked behind the stove during the day), and went to the door that divided the living room from his mother's bedroom. There was a mirror on the door; in it, he could see himself. He was much less impressive than the city. Impressively unimpressive. Rigid straight straw hair. Hard knobbly joints and, he twisted, yep, a solid line of slightly-curved knobs for the spine. Unmoving limbs – that was to say, they stayed about the same length, and never stretched up, even though to go by the other boys by now they should have acquired a _few_ inches. A stubborn nose, too large for his face. Unyielding bushy eyebrows.

His body fell and fell again and again in the face of sickness. But it was uncompromising and dead-set in one respect: it never stopped being an awkward disappointment.

He went in.

His mother's room was very small, but never cold. Most rooms were too cold for him. He had poor circulation. In the small wood-frame bed lay his mother, fast asleep, with her hair rolled up so that it would come out in pale brownish-blonde curls by nightfall. She had left, as always, some money and a list of what they needed on the bedside table, rolled up in a vase. She worked nights; by the time she began, all the stores had closed, and when her work ended, they still hadn't opened. So Steve did the shopping.

He also took on laundry, most of the cleaning, most of the cooking, daytime communication with the landlord, and the relaying of any essential news to the neighbors. These things were not inherently pleasant. He didn't do them with a spring in his step. They were too boring for that. He did them because they needed to be done. It would be lying to say that he wouldn't have preferred to be out at one of the piers, or over by Ebbets Field, or down in Coney Island, coming back late on the train with the other boys, rowdy and stuffed to the gills with hot dogs, candy apples, head swollen with the rush of having held some girl's hand on the beach.

But this was alright. Not the best. But alright, this independent life.

After all, it could be worse. It had been. He would be sixteen in a few months. In his near-sixteen years on earth, he'd had twelve extended hospital stays. They hadn't been pleasant experiences. It was better to be out here, helping his mother, taking part in the city, a living part of it. Better than to being in a ward somewhere, with his lungs burning, with the doctors hovering over him like he was a virus that needed to be contained - and all the while worrying. Worrying over how she'd get food before the corner store closed, and who would talk to Mr. Cooper about the rent, and worrying because _she_ was worrying over _him_.

Some chores now and then were nothing compared to the weight of all that.

There was work to do before school. There was always work to do. Someone had to head to Fulton Street to pay the rent. Mr. Espinosa would not fulfill deliver fish unless an order was placed before Friday. And the rat dilemma was paramount: three had been seen by Mrs. Golovin as she'd progressed slowly up the stairs yesterday. She felt that they were the fault of Mrs. Petrocelli. Mrs. Petrocelli blamed Mr. Quan. Mr. Quan blamed the matzo factory of Blumstein and Ezra, occupying the other lower level storefront. Blumstein and Ezra both took offense. They blamed assorted neighborhood children, the kind with sharp toothy smiles and knives in their pockets, tucked between chewing gum and baseball cards. These miscreants possibly ran a rat-smuggling ring, and tormented honest businesspeople by carting rats across thresholds and store entrances, sacred boundaries as fixed as national borders.

All agreed that the problem required Steve's particular assistance; no one else would do. Quan, Blumstein, and Ezra had work to do. Mrs. Petrocelli was taking a typing course that would determine the very future of her family and that occupied all her time. And Mrs. Golovin had spent so much time progressing upstairs, with a heavy, deliberate step and many heavy, deliberate breaths, that it would have been a waste of all her time and energy to expect her back down before next Tuesday at the earliest.

And, of course, Cooper had a habit of bullying them all. They were all a little bit deficient: accented, with strange connections, liable to send their money overseas or to other cities instead of putting it back into this great American nation and this noble city. Cooper did not like them.

Steve he tolerated.

So Steve would handle the rat problem. He dressed, washed his face and hands, and ate. Surveyed himself one last time in the mirror, making sure his collar was clean and his pants not too wrinkled. He forgot entirely to worry about whether any of it made him look well-turned out and adult, let alone fashionable. This was just as well. He looked none of those things. On his way downstairs, he paused to hold some nails for Mr. Quan, still in the process of fixing his awning. Blumstein and Ezra waved to him as he went out. Through the grimy windows, he could see their spotless interiors, and within a row of strange gleaming machines, gears whirring and turning and producing every hour, on the hour, their enticing product.

"Steve," called Mr. Ezra, "Do not forget the rats! You must tell Cooper!"

"I will," he called back dutifully. But the landlord was all the way on Fulton Street, and so first he'd attend to the fish.

He passed their row of wood frame houses and turned the corner to find the New York skyline sitting there like the backdrop of a stage set. There was a bar of some notoriety just closing; a few men with their hats pulled low skulked out, and on their heels came the aroma of fresh coffee, and a neat old woman with a broom, ready to convert the bar into a coffeehouse during daytime hours. Factory workers with kerchiefs and pails began their march Northwards past the Navy Yard. Shops selling sailors' clothes opened for the day. Around Plymouth Street, he fell into step with Mr. Espinosa himself, and handed him his first order of the day.

"Ah," said Mr. Espinosa, raising his delicate black brows. "Salmon is very good. The physician's favorite, I think?" he said, referring to Steve's mother by his favorite name for her. "But it's up. Twenty-five cents a pound."

Mr. Espinosa must have seen his crestfallen look, because he added, "It's Lanza wanting payment for delivery," with a shrug.

It was 1934. Mayor Laguardia was attempting to reform the Fulton Fish Market across the East River. But in Brooklyn, gangsters and racketeers still had control of the market. Steve followed Mr. Espinosa into his tent under the Manhattan bridge. Outside the tent, garbage piled at the curb and massive brick foundations were blackened brick. But inside, the tables were clean enough. Mr. Espinosa's burly sons were busy hacking at and arranging the catch, carting in massive blocks of ice, and washing away the blood where necessary. The smell ought to have been overpowering, only all the Espinosas were used to it, and Steve was developing a head cold that blocked out most of the smell anyway.

"There's cod," said Mr. Espinosa. "Ten cents for cod. Cod's good."

It was his mother's birthday soon. She did not like cod. Boiled salmon was glorious and red and unusual and special. Boiled cod was what they had every Friday.

"With some butter," said Mr. Espinosa. "The physician will love it."

Butter, unfortunately, was beyond them at this point in the month. When the first of next month hit, maybe. Maybe then some real milk, too, not the powdered stuff. But until then they had nine dollars and fifty cents, and the nine dollar part of that was due down at the rental office by noon today. It was Steve's job to make sure they always had some left over in case of emergency: another bout of sinusitis, pneumonia dropping by again, or even just an asthma attack that left him wheezing for a doctor.

So there would be no top-dollar fish. Cod it was. Steve dutifully handed over pennies for a pound and gave the order details; as he did so, Mr. Espinosa's brother came in, furious over something. He slapped a newspaper down, the _Espa__ña__ Libre_, spoke some words Steve couldn't understand, and then, after a moment, began to hack at fish.

"His wife is Spanish," said Mr. Espinosa. "Things are not so good in Spain right now."

Spain wasn't yet at war. But Steve read the papers. The local newsstands might have made his career in paper delivery obsolete, but he retained a certain fascination with the whole business. He'd sold papers mostly to support his mother, but had kept at it out of genuine interest. Every morning, bright and early, assembling with the other boys on the Brooklyn bridge, he'd find the pulse of the world dropped into his hands. He'd hand it off to other people, see them become animated and passionate and often angry. Brooklyn waking up, Brooklyn as the best of America, America fired-up and full of different perspectives, every voice bringing something new.

"And this on top of Germany. And there is nothing we can do," said Mr. Espinosa sadly. "Nothing."

By 1934, Brooklyn had stopped feeling passionate. Brooklyn – and the country – mostly felt tired.

"Is there anything we could do to help him and his wife, at least?" Steve said, gesturing at Mr. Espinosa's angry brother. And they had a daughter. Pretty. Dark Hair. A few years above Steve. "And for Millie?"

"She's working," said Mr. Espinosa. "I don't know if it helps."

There didn't seem to be any more to say. The Espinosas hadn't taken up his offer. So, bidding them goodbye, Steve headed towards Fulton Street.

The Fulton Street El produced a false dusk, and underneath it neon signs flickered on and off. Steve headed in the direction of COOPER REALTY. The secretary there knew him by now, at least as well as she knew his mother, so there were no surprises when he showed up before her massive walnut desk, bearing nine dollars in an envelope: the rent, just in time. This was routine. She accepted it with a smile.

"I need to see Mr. Cooper now," Steve said.

The smile vanished. "He's very busy," said the secretary. But then, because she knew and liked Steve, she looked furtive and added, "Two minutes. Let me speak to him first."

She vanished behind a frosted glass door and oak door. Steve waited. There was a polished silver clock on the wall. It ticked very loudly until the roar of a train just beyond the wall drowned it out. He had twenty minutes until school began. Possibly he wouldn't make it in time. This was disappointing: he didn't like being late. There were fewer consequences for him than for the other students. He couldn't be made to clap erasers. Everyone knew the chalk clouds would probably be disastrous for someone with his condition. And anyway the teachers didn't care. Steve was a frame house kid, a fatherless kid, decent with a sketchbook but not much else. If he missed some math or spelling, it would hardly jeopardize his future, because he didn't have any kind of grand academic future anyway. He was kind and clever and honest, if sometimes combative, liable to start fights. If he stopped fighting in the streets then he might even grow to do the neighborhood proud in some small way. But not the nation or the human race, because he was neither brilliant nor particularly fortunate.

The secretary came back out and gestured for him to go in. Steve did so. Mr. Cooper's office was cramped and dark, with El blocking all the sunshine, and when another train passed the windows rattled. Mr. Cooper was tall, with thinning blond hair and thin lips. He looked down at Steve for only a split second, then went back to his work. He said, "Everything all right, Steven." It was not a question.

"There are rats," Steve said. He had amassed a good amount of information by canvassing the building last night before his mother had come home. "We hear them at night. Mrs. Golovin saw three on the first landing. Ma found one under the stairs. But they're not just outside. There were two under the stove in our apartment. Mrs. Petrocelli found one under Ricky's bed, she said. And—"

"Steven," said Mr. Cooper. "My buildings do not come with rats."

"We—"

"Steven," said Mr. Cooper. "There are no rats in my buildings."

Cooper owned a stretch from Fulton Street to the Navy Yard, all cheap three-story frame houses with storefronts on the ground level, on a normal day the whole of Steve's world. A guidebook writer from the WPA had come to look at the neighborhood recently. When her magnum opus was published, three or four years from now, Mr. Cooper's buildings would not go down in history as rat-infested. Only as squalid, dirty firetraps.

"We've seen them, like I said," Steve persisted. "I would've caught the one that was bothering Ricky, but—"

"You?" said Mr. Cooper, raising an eyebrow.

Steve flushed. The rat catching had been an abysmal failure. He was neither large, not strong, nor particularly fast. Rat-catching, the kind that didn't boil down to expensive traps and poisons, didn't require a perfect physical specimen. Just guts and a strong stomach, which Steve had. And even Toby Watkins and his gang did it all the time down by the river. But it wasn't easy, either. It needed dexterity, and coordination, and at the very least it helped not to have asthma.

Mr. Cooper took of his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with neat, mechanical movements. When he looked at Steve again it seemed to be with an appropriate level of paternal concern. He said, "Did you walk all the way over here?"

Steve blinked at him.

Obviously he'd walked. It wasn't a big walk. No trolleys or subways necessary; none had even been built to directly connect the neon glamour of Fulton Street to the unwashed wood of the Navy Yard district. It was, by and large, only a few blocks' distance.

But Cooper was operating on two levels now. Beneath the surface, he was plainly inconvenienced. Annoyed, even. But on top he was smooth and worried, he was more father than landlord. He said, "You know, the last time I spoke to your mother, I told her what a shame it was that you have to do this, Steven."

A creeping, embarrassed anger began to flicker somewhere inside Steve. To bring Sarah Rogers into it seemed like foul play.

"I don't see what that has to do with—"

"I know it must be difficult," continued Mr. Cooper, as though he hadn't spoken. "She gets a pension from the Children's Bureau, doesn't she?"

She did. It wasn't much. The Juvenile Court had given them eight dollars a month for Steve until he was eleven, but then his hospitalizations had brought a caseworker down to the Navy Yard. The caseworker – tall, beautiful, a charitable Midtown Manhattan woman with a husband in finance and three gorgeous children of her own (so she'd understood where Sarah was coming from) – disapproved of Sarah working as much as she did, and was quick to point out that a nurse's salary relieved a lot of the state's responsibility in this matter.

Steve was now valued at four dollars a month.

He and his mother needed all four of those dollars. That, and the pension they got for Steve's dad dying in the war, kept them afloat.

"The Bureau has a full report on your condition," said Mr. Cooper. "Don't they? A woman from the Bureau telegrammed the office when she was putting it together, a few months ago. I wonder what she'd think about you having to walk down here every month, Steven. I was sure she mentioned that they wanted Sarah to keep a better eye on you."

It had been a full-blown investigation, their last visit from Midtown Manhattan. 'Unfit parent' had come up, and 'poor health' and 'expensive institutional care.' In the end, the Midtown woman always left things as they were. Minus those two dollars the first year, and then after that another dollar, and then another, so that more trickled away every year.

But Steve hadn't been taken away from his mother. The Bureau didn't really want him. Steve was not a promising investment.

"Wandering around these streets like this. It's not good for someone with your health," said Mr. Cooper. "Next time you try it, you could have another asthma attack, or—"

"I don't—" _like where this is going_, Steve thought. But before he could protest more fully, his chest shuddered, betraying him, and he found it hard to breathe. His head cold had been abating slowly. Now it seemed to hit him as hard as it had that morning, but he wondered if it wasn't the cold at all. He wondered if it was creeping shame and anger welling up in him, if that was what was doing this.

Plenty of kids his age and younger ran errands for their parents, worked, and wandered Brooklyn. It shouldn't matter that _Steve_ was doing it, only it did, because when Steve did it it was proof that he needed monitoring. The Children's Bureau liked to monitor him. When Steve needed more help than Sarah could give, it was a sign that Sarah was failing in her duties. Subtract a dollar. When Sarah made dutiful payment on his medical bills, it was a sign that she didn't need any help at all. Subtract a dollar. The Bureau was very good at weighing every aspect of Steve's life and proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it all amounted to at least one dollar less. Right now he was a four dollar, fight-staring, frame house kid. That was bad enough. But if they heard that Sarah was once again failing to provide for him? Who knew how much more his value would drop. To the Bureau, Steve was a study in depreciation.

Cooper stared at Steve with a vaguely protective air until he was done gasping for breath.

"See, Steven? No one wants you exerting yourself like this," said Cooper. "You shouldn't be running around the neighborhood doing all this for your mother, not a kid like you. I'm surprised you even made it all the way down here. Kid like you should be resting up. I think the Bureau would want to know it, if you weren't."

"It's not right to bring any of this into it. None of this has anything to do with the rats," Steve protested.

"Of course it doesn't," said Mr. Cooper. "Because there aren't any. My buildings don't come with rats, Steven. I make sure of that. Rats are five cents each to get rid of, never mind the five dollar fee those Italians want to even show up for the job in the first place. Wouldn't be good business practices to have rats. Trust me, Stevie. I never let a rat into my building."

He grinned. It stretched out his thin lips in a perfunctory sort of way. The neon glow from the sign outside lit him up so that his skin looked grey, to Steve. A train rattled by, shaking the walls. Steve felt suddenly like he'd stepped into one of Blumstein and Ezra's silver machines, like he was being processed and molded and spat out into the result Cooper wanted.

It was horrible.

"I don't want to see you around here again," said Mr. Cooper. "Not a sick little kid like you. Prudie, would you walk Steve to the door?"

And that was that. Steve still protested, of course. But he couldn't fight Prudie off. In the first place, she was a kind Fulton Street secretary, a polished dame with a decent job. She didn't deserve a frame house kid trying to scrap with her; it didn't seem right. In the second, she probably could have taken him. She escorted him down to the back entrance on Livingston Street. Patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. Around the corner, a clock chimed. He was late for school.

It didn't much matter. Steve was in school mainly for his afternoon fine arts program, and if he missed the other classes no one figured it mattered much – he wasn't going to be a great writer or a mathematical genius anyway. And so it didn't matter either if he spent both of those periods with his anger slowly mounting. His head cold really was abating now, but in its place? He found himself infected with something new. Anger.

He wasn't a person given to rage. He didn't make large productions, he didn't let fury build and build and become bitterness. But he often felt, as now, hopeless and incensed. Sure that something unfair was happening, because that was life: something unfair was always happening. And sometimes you could fight back. Sometimes it was a schoolyard brawl situation, or a matter of standing up to Toby Watkins and his gang down by the docks. And in those instances it was easy. You met a bully. The bully laid you flat. But at least you could do something. You had some control, and you'd tried.

What could he try now? Nothing. Not without Cooper making good on his unspoken promise to call in the Children's Bureau.

He was still thinking it over, picking it apart, trying furiously to find a solution, when Bucky came in.

It was second period. Mathematics.

"You're clapping erasers, James. After school. Four on the dot," said Mr. Richmond, without turning around from the equations Steve was only half-heartedly copying. Bucky didn't even bristle at the injustice of this. As a boy with two parents, a bright future, a decent household income, and a handful of athletic and academic talents he was only vaguely interested in developing for the benefit of the nation, people tended to care very much whether he arrived on time each day. But he was used to this obnoxious favoritism; he took it in stride. He waved George Tucci out of the seat next to Steve, ignoring George's grumbles, and sat down. Then he grabbed Steve's notebook to copy any of the notes he might have missed from first period.

Steve let him. Only there were no notes today. Bucky leafed through the notebook, confused, then set it down and stared at Steve.

"What's going on?" he mouthed.

"James," said Mr. Richmond. "Come here and do number five."

Reluctantly, Bucky stood and made his way to the blackboard. There was scattered laughter. George Tucci in particular seemed to find this turn of events hilarious. Some of the loudest laughs, however, came from Ruth Kelly and Patsy Davis and Ellie Meeks, in the front. They were not entirely gloating laughs, like George Tucci's was. They were appreciative. But probably not for mathematics.

Bucky was undergoing a growth spurt. Last year, he'd had an inch or so on Steve, and maybe - _maybe_ - a few pounds. This year he was, according to Mr. Peele, the principal: a grown man in everything but intellect. But Mr. Peele didn't give him enough credit. Bucky was smart. He just didn't lord it over people. He could sit with a girl and let her talk his ear off; he wasn't the kind to demand that she shut up just so he could look like the smart one. He never did that with Steve, either, for that matter. This was a rare kind of quality, especially in a kid like Bucky, with two parents and a growth spurt, who could have commanded the room if he'd felt like it.

Sometimes he did feel like it. But not today. Three flunked math problems and a whole period of squinting at Steve later, he apparently felt like Steve wasn't telling him enough. He tossed a few notes at Steve's head. Steve mouthed, "Tell you later," and went back to strategizing.

Through third and fourth periods Bucky waited until Steve was looking in his general direction, then lifted his eyebrows and held his hands out expectantly, theatrically. Steve only vaguely noted that he was doing it, and shrugged in response each time. He wasn't ignoring Bucky deliberately. It was only that the rat problem and its potential solution were still percolating inside his head.

By fifth and sixth period, both had given up any pretense of paying attention. Steve hadn't flipped a page in his notebook for three hours. He just sat there and scratched out several cartoon rats on his desktop absentmindedly as he thought. And Bucky had hooked his feet onto the bottom of the seat in front of him, and leaned far back with his hands behind his head, and occasionally shot Steve a look of calm, accepting exasperation.

It wasn't until lunch that the problem surfaced.

"I need to catch a rat," Steve said. The lunch today was a watery kind of tomato soup and peas. He didn't have much of an appetite, but he ate some peas anyway, the same way he did every day, always with a sort of vain hope that eating most of what was in front of him would lead to a growth spurt. "A big one. Or I guess a few small ones. But preferably a big one."

Bucky's mother had sent creamed chicken, a jelly sandwich, a hard-boiled egg, an apple, a sponge cake, and lemonade. He'd been eating the sandwich with one hand, and passing the chicken over to Steve (in the vain hope that Steve might accept it) with the other. He now found his sizeable appetite now completely gone.

"A rat?" Bucky said.

"A big one," Steve confirmed absentmindedly. He passed the chicken back just as absentmindedly. His soup sat abandoned.

The trouble was: _how_? He could purchase bait and cages with his own money, but it wouldn't be cheap. And if it didn't work out then he'd have spent all the rest of this month's pay on it. And any expenses came with one glaring attendant problem that made it seem like the wrong tactic entirely.

"You've cracked, haven't you?" Bucky said, after a minute.

Steve outlined the rat problem very briefly. He left out any personal details his neighbors might not want Bucky to know; downplayed Prudie's involvement in the matter, being that it was strictly professional and not personal; failed to mention most of the details involving the Children's Bureau, since that was a kind of family embarrassment and anyway Bucky had probably already gleaned those anyway – Bucky was good at reading between the lines; omitted most references to his health (Bucky had to know that already, and most people made too big a deal about it anyway); resolutely kept his mother out of it; and, in fact, the whole process took about six words. He left it to Bucky to fill in the rest, which Bucky did, since conversations with Steve usually ran in this manner. Steve didn't talk much. When he did, he was brief and direct and honest to a fault. But he didn't always think there was much to say about his life.

So Bucky had become very good at stringing together the unsaid things.

"Your landlord's bleeding you about the rat thing," he guessed.

This was not an inappropriate guess, and Steve was by now scrawling out a list of potential rat-catching tools, so he just nodded.

Bucky grabbed the list out from under him, prompting a glare.

"Poison, Steve?" he said, giving Steve a disbelieving look back. "Your health's are bad enough when there's no poison floating around. Peanut Butter? Why not cheese? Cages—we have cages. Come by my place. We'll get you traps, too, the real kind. Put 'em down every night. You won't even have to go through that crook. We've got cheese in the kitchen. Becky's got—"

Steve shook his head. "No, I don't want your stuff."

Bucky put the list down and worked his jaw. He noticed the chicken, now returned to his side of the table, and put a hand to his forehead in frustration. "Steve—" he began.

"I don't want to catch them regularly," Steve said. "Give in, catch 'em myself every time. Then he gets away with it. When one bites through the wall, who repairs it? It's not gonna be him. 'Cause he can say it was us. There are no rats."

This required some more guesswork. But after a second Bucky got it.

"If he swindles you now, then he can do it again later," Bucky concluded.

"Right," Steve said, looking at him fully for the first time today. "I've gotta get him to cough up. So I need a rat. And _I_ need to catch it. I can't use your stuff."

This needed more guesswork than Bucky had in him at the moment. It was also an old fight, played out over the years with chicken lunches and baseball cards and secondhand toys. And Bucky was tired of it. He'd been tired of it for years now. He figured Steve would always have his pride – some days, it was all Steve had – but that was no call for Steve to be _stupid_ about it, which Steve frequently was.

He opened his mouth to argue. The bell rang. They separated. Bucky was not in the Fine Arts program. He was in Business, through no real choice of his own, and spent the rest of the day making eyes at Ruth Kelly, sitting in the Home Economics classes across the hall. But always with a sort of low-level simmering frustration over Steve and his rats. The frustration wouldn't leave him, not even when he walked Ruth to her locker after eighth period. That was when he discovered Steve just a few steps away, quizzing Toby Watkins on the best methods for bare-knuckle rat catching.

Steve, having resolved a plan of action, had actually paid attention in his afternoon classes. He was now using every spare minute to make up for this, devoting his breaks entirely to the rat problem.

"Excuse me," Bucky told Ruth, smiling apologetically and gently pushing her towards her next class, so that she wouldn't overhear and assume Steve was, on top of being a troublemaker and a little too quiet, some kind of rat-obsessed crazy person. Then, when he caught up to Steve, he said, "Really? This guy? You don't even like this guy. This guy's a creep."

Steve blinked at him. Steve didn't like Toby Watkins, and Toby was a creep, and Toby had laid him flat more than once. But Steve never made things personal, so to him this objection seemed beside the point.

Toby Watkins shoved a finger in Bucky's chest. "Me, you, Barnes. Four o'clock."

Bucky stared at him. "No, I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not the guy who gets into pointless fights. That's Steve. You're looking for Steve."

Toby looked befuddled. He stared at Steve, as though looking for an explanation. Steve, by now very used to Bucky's ribbing, only said, very calmly, "Hi." Then Bucky ruined the moment, and the point he'd been trying to make, by shoving Toby away before he could start something.

"Get lost," he told Toby.

Toby got lost.

"Like I'd fight him. At four o'clock, apparently we'll be catching rats," Bucky said, with no small amount of sarcasm.

"Well, no. At four, you're gonna be clapping erasers," Steve pointed out.

Bucky exhaled. Hard. He put his hands to his temples. He said, "Just let me help y—"

"I don't want cages, or for you to buy me traps," Steve said, "Or your Ma's _cheese_— "

"This is how you catch a rat, Steve," Bucky said. "This is how normal people catch rats. They get help. You can't just—just try to wrestle one and reel it in. This isn't a fight under the bridge. And you lose those! How are you gonna get a rat? There are rats with more muscle than you."

Really his concern was that Steve would try and end up getting bitten or something. It seemed like the kind of thing Steve would do. Steve had trouble recognizing limitations.

"You can't even get a look from Ellie Meeks, and that practically comes free—"

Steve's face hardened. "That's unkind," he said, missing the point entirely. "She's a nice girl."

Bucky stopped. Inhaled. Prepared to apologize to Ellie Meeks, who wasn't even present. Because otherwise Steve would latch onto _that_ and then the conversation would really go nowhere.

The bell rang. It was ninth period. Steve nodded at him once, then walked away with all of the dignity his four-foot-ten self could muster. And Bucky spent the rest of the schoolday not just frustrated but a little furious, like he'd caught some kind of rage virus from Steve, who had of course made a full recovery from his morning fury. Steve had by now progressed to calm determination. At four o'clock, Steve went home entirely resolved to catch a rat. Bucky went to the yard to clap erasers. Toby Watkins was there. Bucky sent chalk clouds in his direction, just because.

Sarah Rogers was awake when Steve got home. She was pulling on her stockings in the back room, getting ready for work. When she heard the key in the lock, she called out for him; they had maybe an hour or so every day now that the paper route was nonexistent, an hour between the end of school and the start of her job. Steve put his coat on one of the nails by the door, and his cap on a lower-hanging nail, and went in to greet her. She patted the space next to her on the bed without saying anything, and he curled up in it, like he was very small, because even though he'd be sixteen soon he tended to forget it in the one hour he had with his mother. Sarah said that was alright, since in every other respect he'd been a grown man since he was six or so.

She didn't ask if the rent had been delivered or the fish ordered for Friday; she trusted him. And, regarding the fish, she hadn't been expecting anything other that cod, because cod was cheap and it was what they always had. So Steve didn't feel the need to confess that he'd tried for something better and failed.

He did feel the need to confess about the rats. She didn't ask about that, either. But it still bubbled up inside him. It wasn't just that Cooper had refused. It was the way he'd refused – bringing Sarah into it, pretending it was out of fatherly concern, invoking their pension from the Children's Bureau.

"He's not gonna fix the rat problem," Steve said. "He says there aren't any rats. He threatened to call the Bureau on us if I ask again. That woman who came last time – remember she interviewed everybody? And she thinks I should be lying in bed all day."

Sarah had been rubbing his back. Now her hand stilled. She didn't like the woman from Midtown Manhattan. She was not vocal or sullen in her dislike, just firm, and determined to keep her son at all costs. The woman from Midtown Manhattan branded this "ingratitude," and had included it in the report.

"You know," she said, after a minute, "He told Quan he'd have the inspector down on his place, the last time something like this came up."

And, she explained, he'd told Mrs. Petrocelli he'd have her husband deported, and Blumstein & Ezra & Golovin he'd terrorized by unknown means, but he'd still done it, somehow, because that was what people like him did. That was what bullies did. They didn't just exist under the bridges, in alleyways, menacing passing women and trapping rats. They also existed to collect your rent, to run Bureaus and perform Inspections. In fact, the higher up you went, the bigger and more numerous the bullies got, probably.

Sarah was sorry it had fallen to Steve to deal with him. Genuinely sorry. But she was also quick – quicker than Steve. She always had been, and she came very soon to the conclusion it had taken him all day to reach.

"We need to show him a rat, then," she told Steve.

"I need to," Steve said. "I said I'd handle this, and I will. So that he can't make a stink about the Bureau again."

"If we catch them with traps," Sarah said, "It's obvious."

"Where it snaps across the neck," Steve said, nodding. "Anybody can tell we bought traps."

Sarah said. "If they know we have money to spend on things like that—"

"They'll cut the pension again," Steve said glumly.

It was humiliating, sometimes. They needed the money. Everyone knew they did. Even the people over in Midtown agreed on it: no one was needier than Steve and Sarah Rogers. But now, with almost everyone in the country in similar straits, the question changed.

Did they deserve it? Not even Steve was sure they did.

"Maybe they should cut the pension," Steve said hesitantly. "It would be better to—to not rely on 'em. And I could get another job. The sugar factory takes boys on for—"

"Horrible, smoky work that isn't for you," Sarah said firmly, but she leaned down and kissed the top of his head to show that she wasn't angry.

"But if we're not getting the money from them—" Steve persisted. "If—I mean. If they find out we can just take care of our own rats maybe we _don't_ need it. I mean, it's my fault we need it anyway, because I get sick. But if I didn't get sick and could work more—and we could get by for a little bit on Dad's pension, right?"

"No," Sarah said, and she tugged his hair a bit to show how silly his thinking was, but she didn't tug enough to hurt, and she immediately smoothed it over and kissed it again, as though it were a valuable thing. "It's not you. It's the rent, and the food. Milk. Fish. And clothes."

"At least I don't grow much," Steve said.

His mother laughed. Then she added, "And you need pencils and things, or else you'll never get by at school or with your art."

"Don't tell them we have pencils," Steve warned. "If they find out we can buy pencils…"

Sarah laughed again, like this too was a joke. But it wasn't a joke. The Bureau had the Rogerses all written up in reports. The two pensions – one for the child, one for the dead husband – were duly noted, and weighted, and squinted at. Expenses were eyed. What was Sarah buying? And why? And why should the state pay for Steve not to starve? If his mother managed to put aside ten cents for rat traps and other luxuries, that was. If she could do that, there was no reason she couldn't buy her own fish (ten cents) or powdered milk (9 cents a jar).

"I wish I didn't have to take handouts for it all," Sarah said, her old lilting accent coming through. It did that sometimes when she was ashamed. "But I do."

Her hand dropped away. Steve looked up at her. She looked impossibly sad, and he didn't know what to do about it. He felt like, if he let her go on like this, all the anger would creep back into him, and he'd feel frustrated, and then he really wouldn't be able to help her. He couldn't say much to make her feel better; he and his mother were neither of them big talkers. So he hugged her, drawing his thin arms around her for a minute, feeling her warm and soft and human beneath him, and putting his head in the crook of her neck.

After a second, her hand came up and brushed down his hair again. Restored.

"We can't use anything that costs money," Sarah said, after a moment. "Cooper could tell them about it."

"I know," Steve said glumly. He lifted his face and explained about Bucky, and all Bucky's offers. Traps, cages, cheese. Naturally he'd had to turn them down. If he showed up with a well-fed rat in a cage, Cooper might call down to the Bureau to tell them that not only was Sarah Rogers letting her son run around town despite his many ailments, she was also using all her working woman's income to buy him pets, so clearly she could afford his upkeep.

Subtract one dollar.

"So not a trap. A trap's too expensive. So we don't use those," continued Sarah, now thinking out loud. "There's got to be something in the building we can use as a cage."

There was. Blumstein and Ezra had a kind of steel basket. After a few words with Sarah, they detached it from their machines and donated it to the cause. Then she and Steve canvassed Mr. Quan. He had no cheese. Only peanut butter. Mrs. Golovin had a kind of glue that she used to make dolls for the neighborhood children. She thought it might hold the rat's legs fast to the basket. Maybe. Mrs. Petrocelli didn't have anything, but she did offer the best vantage point to catch the rats, which was her section of the landing, just outside Ricky's window, because for some reason the rats liked it there.

Sarah still hadn't fixed her hair by the time she had to leave. But she had helped Steve set up most of his plan. She rushed back into their apartment for some hair pins and a hat, kissed him and told him to go to bed early no matter what the results were – she could sit vigil for the rats when she came back from work – and started down the stairs.

She bumped into Bucky, coming up the stairs. He had cages and traps and four kinds of cheese with him.

"What's that?" she asked.

"It's for rat catching," Bucky said. He peered around her at the landing, where Steve was sitting assembling the trap. "What's that?"

"It's for rat catching," Steve said blandly.

Sarah glanced from one to the other. She knew her son, and she knew Bucky. So, after some guesswork, she said, "Did you _explain_ to Bucky that we can't use his supplies? Because Mr. Cooper might assume we bought them, and tell the Bureau?"

Steve flushed. Ah. No. No explanations. Sarah raised an eyebrow at him and continued down the stairs.

This exchange put some swagger in Bucky's step. Before, he'd been angry and annoyed at prideful, stubborn Steve – and the worst of it was that he still stood by that Steve, Steve at his absolute worst. But now he saw the glimmers of a stupid misunderstanding beneath the surface. That was all it had been. A miscommunication. Albeit one that was still Steve's fault.

He located the hidden key Steve and Sarah kept on the landing, gave Steve a grin, and stepped into Steve's apartment to unload all his things. Then he came back out and sat next to Steve in front of Mrs. Petrocelli's door. Steve was stubbornly smearing a kind of slow-drying glue or paste to the bottom of a metal container.

"Sorry," he told Bucky, after a second. "If I wasn't clear."

"I still don't really know what's going on, Steve," said Bucky, determined to drag it out a little. He'd learned from Toby Watkins that Steve had no trouble describing the exact kinds of rats or giving an estimate of their number. While he, Steve's best friend, had to drag every word out of him.

Steve stared at him for second. He was blank on the surface, but underneath that Bucky could tell he was thinking over what to say. Finally, he said, "You know we mostly live on the money we get for my dad, right?"

He put the glue down, and reached for a jar of peanut butter. Bucky nodded. Money was a strange thing to talk about. He and Steve avoided it, usually. Bucky's folks weren't rich, but they had enough money to never have to talk about it with people outside the family. Which was something.

"We get money for me, too," Steve said, now focusing a little too hard on his makeshift trap. "Because I'm—we're. I mean. _I'm_ at-risk. Because of my health, and other things like that. We get money if they like the way Ma does things. Which they don't. And—"

He caught one of his fingers in the bottom of the metal basket and gratefully used this distraction to stop speaking. How could he… How could _anybody_ explain what it was like?

He was worth four dollars. Probably less. Not for any particular reason. Just because he got sick a lot, or maybe because they didn't think his mother was worth much, either.

And Steve at age fifteen didn't know the word _mortifying_; his vocabulary wasn't much to write home about. So he didn't say that sometimes his life felt that way. Even after he learned the word, he still wouldn't ever say it. It would always occur to him that other people had it worse, other people got treated like they weren't even human sometimes, so he had no right to complain. So, right now, he didn't say anything else, except, "We need that money. I'm…not cheap. Medicines, and stuff like that. And when I went in to talk about the rat thing, he threatened to have the Bureau cut us off. Said he'd report to them. Well, he didn't exactly say it. I kinda wish he'd just said it."

Steve hadn't liked the way it had snaked under conversation, a concealed threat. He didn't like conversations like that, where the worst stuff was like the rats under the floorboards: hidden, parasitic, taking its power from all the false kindness that surrounded it.

Bucky didn't say anything at first. They never talked about this stuff. They were close, and they knew each other down to the bone, but to Steve, none of this was Bucky's problem. Sure, Bucky might have understood. Bucky was like him in a lot of ways. They were both from Brooklyn, they were neither of them rich, they didn't hang out under the bridges to torment girls coming home from the fish market, they liked the Dodgers, they spoke the same language of wisecracks mingled with honest truth, and they had a kind of silent understanding. Usually. Most of the time.

But Bucky was also nothing like him sometimes. Bucky sat there carelessly on the landing, and he was already a man. He was tall, attractive, healthy, even the fading Brooklyn sun caught him at just the right angle. He had two parents, and few essential chores beyond looking after his younger siblings. And he wasn't a frame house kid; he lived on the other side of Fulton near Atlantic Avenue, where the Mohawks and other interesting people did, in an old row house with crumbling masonry that was still one of the nicest houses Steve had ever been in.

It wasn't that Bucky wouldn't have accepted Steve, even if he'd known how things got for Steve and his mother sometimes. Even if he'd known that their problems were mundane, ugly problems: not enough money left after the rent, rats in the house, boiled cod on Fridays. Steve had always assumed Bucky sort of knew about that stuff anyway. He'd never kept it from Bucky.

But he never brought it up, either. It didn't really belong in a conversation with Bucky. Bucky was Dodgers games and couch cushions on the floor and poking fun at each other, he was all easy laughter and friendship, all the way down to the bone of him. Whereas if you cut Steve down to the bone, down to where the hidden truth of him was, you'd mostly find that he couldn't bring in enough money for his mother, whether he was working or not, and that he sapped up all the resources in the house, that everything went to his medicines and his doctor's bills.

Steve wasn't worth four dollars. He cost his mother a lot more than that.

Which, in his eyes, meant he hadn't proven his worth at all.

Bucky stared at Steve. For a minute, irrationally, Steve became afraid that he'd march down the stairs. Take his things and go. Decide that everything here was too squalid and ugly and dumb and not fun, not his style. It made no sense; he knew Bucky wasn't like that. But evidently the fear had been lingering there all along, that if he talked too much about this stuff, Bucky would know his worth, or lack thereof, and would reject him.

"What a creep," was all Bucky said. "So we do this the cheap way. I wish you'd just _said_ that, stupid. Then I wouldn't have had to run home for all this stuff."

And that was that. Steve felt suddenly, oddly free. It was odd because he hadn't known he'd been trapped before. But he had been. And he could tell it didn't mean much to Bucky: accepting him with all his strangeness, with his rat problems and his frame house. To Bucky, that was just what friendship was. Bucky was that true.

But to Steve it meant a lot.

"So what do we do now? We wait?" Bucky said. "I told my Ma I was probably stayin' the night here, just so you know. So keep your bony elbows to yourself tonight. You move around way too much for a guy with such a small bed. Hey, did I tell you I'm taking Ruth Kelly to Russo's next week?"

He grabbed the box from Steve's hands and started showing him to lay the trap better, all the while discussing the superior intellect and attributes of Ruth Kelly. The light behind the buildings across the way lit him up, the orange glow of the sun all laid out like a stage set with Bucky at the center, and he seemed to Steve, then, like the very best of people.

They stayed up, eating dinner on the landing, waiting for the rats. One squeaked past them and through the open door of the Rogers apartment. Steve dove after it a little foolishly and ended up cutting himself on one of the lower nails near the door. Bucky spent an anxious ten minutes helping him wash the cut – a long gash in his arm – and Steve consequently felt bad, and let Bucky bring some of their pillows onto the landing, and some cards, and they played until it got dark, joking occasionally with the Petrocellis. But they didn't see any more rats. Just heard them scratching around, beneath the boards of the landing, an infestation beneath the frame of the house that they didn't know how to force up.

So they waited.

Sarah Rogers came home just as the sky was lighting up, this time over the back of the building, reaching them before it hit the Manhattan skyline. Steve and Bucky were asleep on the landing, propped up on pillows pushed against the grimy brick. There was a rat in the trap. It had eaten peanut butter mixed with glue, and died there. When she woke Bucky up to make absolutely sure his mother knew where he was, another squeaked by, and almost crawled onto Steve, and Bucky, in a panic, stepped on it hard and killed it. Toby Watkins would have been proud.

Steve dropped both rats on Cooper's desk a few hours later. Bucky had tied them together by their tails; he said it made a better show.

"So that's ten cents off the rent?" Steve said.

Mr. Cooper stared at him, aghast. There were two dead rats lying on his important papers. Or. Well. One and a half. One had evidently had its neck crushed.

"Five cents each," Steve reminded him.

"These aren't from my buildings!" Cooper insisted.

"I can hardly walk further than your buildings, Mr. Cooper," Steve said. "Sick kid like me." He had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and now he put one hand nonchalantly on Cooper's desk, and in the neon light the gash from the nail looked a lot like a vicious claw mark.

Bucky had said he should do this. It wasn't lying, exactly. It was taking advantage of his image: skinny kid, sorry-looking, with bags under his eyes, who might have made the trek to Fulton Street on a good day, but who was pushing himself real hard after a tremendous battle all through last night, a battle he'd earned scars from.

A battle with rats. But then you couldn't have everything.

Bucky had also told him to threaten to sell the whole story to the _Brooklyn Eagle_. But that seemed like too much. So Steve decided to see how Cooper would react. The silence stretched around the office for a second. He thought he could hear a muffled laugh from Prudie behind the frosted glass door. Cooper stiffly moved his mug to the edge of his desk, upending some papers, and in response one of the rats seemed to twitch.

Cooper jumped back. Steve held his ground.

After a minute, Cooper said, "I'll have Prudie call Sciarra's people now. They'll be there by tomorrow."

"Thank you," Steve said politely.

Then he stepped out, and waved to Prudie, and escorted himself out through the front entrance onto Fulton Street. Bucky was waiting for him. When he saw that Steve was grinning, he grinned too.

"Looks like you caught your rat," he said.

"You know," Steve said thoughtfully, "I don't think that rat will bother me anymore."

They laughed as the El rattled overhead. Bucky said, "Even the boring stuff turns into an adventure with you, Rogers," and then seemed surprised that he'd said it, and slung an arm around Steve and dragged him down half the block to cover it up. Afterwards, Bucky would remember, for a time, how comfortable he felt with his arm around Steve, and he'd start doing it more often, unselfconsciously, simply because he liked it and it was comfortable.

Beyond that, much of the day would slip out of his mind within five years. It had been, by his standards, an ordinary day. He would preserve instead the moments when he thought Steve was happier – he liked Steve happy, even though at sixteen he didn't quite know why – like days at Coney Island, coming back late on the train with Steve, rowdy and stuffed to the gills with hot dogs, candy apples, head swollen with the rush of having grabbed Steve's shoulders on the beach.

He wouldn't really understand _why_ the rush for another year after that.

Eventually, that would leave his mind, too.

But Steve would keep the boring and grim rat-catching moments, the minutes playing cards with Bucky as the sun went down behind the New York skyline. That evening didn't seem ordinary to him. It seemed impossibly important, even then, in 1934, because nothing had changed between them for Bucky, nothing had made Bucky walk away; and because something imperceptible had changed for Steve.

So he remembered the day, all of the day, always, even if maybe it had been a little grimy and ordinary. A frame house memory. A four dollar memory of their friendship, that grew in value over time, that seemed incredibly precious years later: when he was alone, and the El no longer rattled over Fulton Street, and the frame houses were gone, and Bucky was a name on a wall somewhere.

* * *

This is a chapter from a longer story that may or may not ever see the light of day.


End file.
